


the giving tree

by yellow_caballero



Category: Beetlejuice (TV 1989), Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: 1/3 cartoon 1/3 musical 1/3 Primal Childhood Experience, Gen, you're young and it's hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 09:44:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20992751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: Lydia Deetz has the best life any eleven year old could ask for. She has six parents: five who hang around, four who are dead, three who are dead and moving, two who are concerned about her being normal, and one who is Beetlejuice. It doesn't always add up.Or: childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.





	the giving tree

**Author's Note:**

> “I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.” - Neil Gaiman, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane.
> 
> Don't worry about the canonicity/timeline, reality is fake. Last line of the summary is from Edna St. Vincent Murray, a wonderful poet. This one turned out to be more autobiographical than I was expecting. There is NO shipping of Beetlejuice/Lydia in this fic, nor should it be interpreted that way. Enjoy.

Lydia woke up on the first day of September very scared!

Normally Lydia wasn’t afraid of being scared. Being scared was your friend. If anything ever scared you, all you had to do was laugh really loudly and then scare them right back, then it wouldn’t be scary anymore. But the thing that was scaring her wasn’t a spooky skeleton, or a giant spider with a thousand eyes. It left her with a rolling, shaky feeling in her gut, and it made her kind of want to throw up. It was something she couldn’t scare back, or hit with a baseball bat. It was...the first day of middle school. 

When she blinked at her wind-up alarm clock that made little bats shake and screech when the alarm went off, she saw that it was only six thirty am. Still an hour and a half before school. She could get a little more sleep, but she was way too wired to go back to bed. She slid out of bed instead, flipping on her Nightmare Before Christmas desk lamp, and after going to the bathroom and brushing her teeth for two minutes exactly she carefully brushed out her thick black hair and pinned all of her biggest, sparkliest hair clips to her ponytail. She carefully added her black scrunchie, her hair clip with a bat on it, her hair clip with a black kitty on it, and a big armful of slap bracelets. She posed heroically in the vanity mirror, little polaroids of blurry pictures she took of her family and cool kitties she found outside stuck to the sides. Ready for action!

She pursued her closet carefully. She picked out her cutest black jeans, her black t-shirt with the big kitty on it, and carefully overlaid her favorite piece of clothing of all time. It was her spider-silk poncho, the one that was from the Netherworld, made with spider-silk they stole from the owner of that creepy pawn shop. It was smooth and soft, and made her feel very cool. She tugged on her fingerless gloves that would come in a lot of handy if she ever rode a motorbike and toed on her Mary Jane shoes. She posed heroically in the mirror again, fixing her ponytail and baring her teeth. Yeah! The other girls aren’t going to mess with Lydia Deetz! She was going to rule the sixth grade! In her cool poncho and her batty hair clips, she was going to be the most awesome kid in school. 

It was still only seven am, so Lydia wrote carefully in her diary and took a commemorative picture with her polaroid. 

_ Dear Secret Diary,  _ Lydia wrote.  _ First day of school! Crossing my fingers that everything goes okay! My plan is: to make one (1) friend with the same schedule as me. And I’ll sit next to her during lunch. <3 If that doesn’t work I’m turning the whole school into mealworms. Wish me luck diary!!! _

She carefully packed and repacked and double checked her She-Ra backpack before fixing it securely to her back and bounding down the steps. She could hear the voices of her parents in the kitchen, and she eagerly slid all the way down the banister before landing on the carpet in a perfect five point landing. 

As usual, her genius went unappreciated. Delia was sitting at the kitchen table, arranging her morning Tarot that was probably going to advise her to buy more crystals or something, as Daddy checked the stock market or something boring. 

“Lydia,” Delia scolded. “How many times do I have to say? Don’t slide down the banister, you’ll break your neck!”

“Then I’ll haunt the house,” Lydia said promptly, “and I won’t have to go to school and do homework! I can have fun all day!”

“Don’t even joke,” Aunt Barbara scolded lightly. She flipped a pancake, and Lydia brightened when she saw that she and Uncle Adam were making a big breakfast. Uncle Adam manned the eggs on the stove, easily pushing them around in her favorite scrambled way as he waved a hand and the toast went sailing into the toaster, the plunger pressing down. It always made Lydia giggle to see it. Aunt Barbara easily flicked a finger and the carton of skim hazelnut organic 100% Pure Nut juice went sailing out of the fridge, pouring a full cup onto the glass set out for Lydia on the table. Lydia eagerly sat down, awkwardly dropping her backpack back to the ground, and she eagerly dug into the grapefruit that sat out in halves on the table. Sugar sprinkled itself onto the grapefruit, and Lydia quickly chowed down. Being nervous always made her hungry. 

“Excited for your first day of middle school, honey?” Uncle Adam asked. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It’s a very auspicious day in a young lady’s life, you know.”

“The day futures are made,” Delia said mysteriously. She flipped over a Tarot card, eyebrows furrowing. “It says here you are about to embark upon...a great journey!”

“Middle school is so whatever,” Lydia said flippantly, although her stomach was twisting itself in knots. “High school is where it’s really at. I’m going to breeze through this, no problem.”

“That’s my girl,” Daddy boomed, flipping his newspaper shut and patting her awkwardly on the shoulder. “Deetzes are troopers. We are entrepreneurs. I want you to have a nice,  _ normal  _ time at Poe Middle.”

“And Maitlands are always friendly,” Aunt Barbara chirped. She brought the pan over, sliding a special set of smiley face pancakes on Lydia’s plate. Lydia wasn’t a baby anymore, and she was totally old enough to eat the normal pancakes, but the smiley faces were her favorite. She smiled at Aunt Barbara, who smiled back and replaced the pan on the stove. “Make sure to make lots of friends, honey! Lots of nice, normal -”

“Very ordinary -” Adam added -

“Wholesome friends,” Delia breathed, clapping her hands together. “We can have sleepovers! I saw the cutest ideas for cupcakes on Pinterest I just have to try. Do try to have a nice time, Lydia.”

Uncle Adam scooped the eggs on her plates, and Lydia quickly salted and ate those too. She sipped on the milk for longer than she strictly needed to, swishing the nutty, low fat, healthy substance around in her mouth before carefully swallowing. “So…” Lydia said slowly, pushing the eggs around on her plate. “Does that mean Beej isn’t going to see me off on my first day of school?”

As usual, the name caused different effects on everyone at the table. Daddy stiffened awkwardly, Delia’s mouth pursed, Uncle Adam set his mouth in a straight line, and Barbara looked around uncomfortably. 

“Don’t you want it to be just family today, honey?” Uncle Adam asked, somewhat desperately. 

“But Beej is family,” Lydia protested. “I signed the papers and everything!”

The words had their usual effect on the family too. Daddy groaned, burying his head in his hands, Delia quickly patted her mouth with a napkin as she desperately consulted the tarot, and the Maitlands exchanged exasperated looks. 

“You were ten,” Aunt Barbara said, as if she couldn’t quite decide whether or not to be firm or sympathetic. “Those papers were not legally binding.”

“I let a ghost babysit my daughter for two weeks,” Daddy said, muffled into his hands. “Two little weeks! I come back, he’s fed her nothing but peanut butter and the blood of the innocent, he’s tricked her into signing adoption papers so he can be visible in the real world, and suddenly I have  _ three  _ ghost relatives instead of the  _ acceptable two _ , and they’ve accidentally dropped half the neighborhood into a living hell. And now he has visitation.”

“Hell custody courts are nasty,” Delia said quietly, with haunted eyes. “The lines. The paperwork.”

“It’s not  _ hell _ ,” Lydia insisted, for the five hundreth time, “it’s the  _ Netherworld _ . You said!”

“Of  _ course  _ it’s the Netherworld,” Aunt Barbara said severely, glaring down everyone else. “Because nobody is going to H-E-double hockey sticks in this house. Because that would be a very traumatizing thing for a fifth grader.”

“I’m in sixth grade now!”

“Of course, honey,” Uncle Adam said quickly, “the Netherworld. Obviously. Lydia, he’ll be around for Christmas, we just want a low key morning today. How would you like donuts on the way to school? Does that sound good to you?”

“Donuts!” Lydia cried, waving her fork in the air, her legal-guardian-in-hell-or-the-Netherworld-if-you’re-eleven momentarily forgotten. “Yay!”

Every adult breathed a sigh of relief, even if Delia muttered about GMOs. 

After that, her parents quickly encouraged her to finish up her food, and then of course they had to take a ton of pictures. Lydia fussily arranged her polaroid and made sure the framing was Abstract and Artistic for her self-portrait (“This is just a blob, Lydia - but hey, what do I know about art!”) and she reluctantly let Delia take more normal family pictures on her disposable camera. Sure, Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara were just weird cold spots and haunted shadows in the film, but it was the thoughts and memories that counted! 

Then Lydia had to light a candle for her Mommy, and everyone had to stand in respectful silence around Lydia’s altar as she knelt down and light the incense and scraped a little bit of toast into the offering dish. She had done a lot of research on Buddhist altars and altars from all religions that existed on Earth, and a lot that only existed in Hell (“The Netherworld!”). Her Mommy’s altar was the best in the world and also Hell. 

“Dear Mommy,” Lydia said quietly, hands clasped tight and eyes screwed shut. Daddy and Delia held hands, and Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara held hands too. “I love you. I’m going to have a very nice day at school and make a friend with the same schedule as me. We might have a sleepover but I don’t know yet. All of my parents are very happy. Daddy is doing really good and Delia is really nice and Aunt Barbara said that she’d teach me how to knit when I came home and Uncle Adam wants to play baseball with me indoors and Beej says that he’s going to teach me how to turn intestines inside out. If you run into Beej in the Netherworld please teach him how to be a better foster demon hell daddy because I think he needs classes. I love you Mommy. Goodbye. Here’s Dad. Okay. I love you.”

Then she made Daddy sit down and say a short prayer, although he said his silently, and then she blew out the candle and snuffed out the incense and ate the toast because otherwise you got ants. 

Then they went to school and got donuts. She was really nervous, even if the donuts were good. She wished that Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara could sit in the car with her, or that Aunt Barbara could hold her hand, but that wasn’t how their family worked. It was just weird. But that was okay, because Lydia liked the strange and unusual. If all of her new friends at middle school didn’t, that was their problem. 

That was their problem. Everything would be good in middle school. And if they didn’t like her, then Beej could swap their shoelaces and urethras. 

“You’ll be okay,” Daddy said anxiously, helping her get out of the car with her She-Ra backpack. “Right, honey?”

“Of course,” Lydia said, with confidence she didn’t feel. She had her poncho. She had her four parents, which were really her five parents, except one didn’t live with them anymore. Secretly, she had six parents, although everyone yelled at her and said that was “only barely legal”. She knew the truth. Everything would be okay. 

When something scared you, you just laughed in its face and scared it right back. That was what Beej always said. And Beej was usually wrong, except sometimes he was very, very right. 

Lydia turned on her heel and ran into the courtyard of her new gigantic brick middle school, although she was scared, because she was scared. 

  
  
  
  


Waiting for school to start was awkward. Lydia read  _ A Series of Unfortunate Events  _ again, but tried to make it kind of low-key, because she didn’t want to look like she didn’t want to make friends. She did! She was reinventing herself. 

She stumbled around totally lost until she found her homeroom, and she awkwardly slid into the first seat the teacher pointed to. The teacher looked nice. She was very tall, with curly hair and a big, loose skirt and floppy blouse. She narrowed her eyes as she surveyed the motley group of children she would be trapped in a small, claustrophobic room with for the next three years. She took careful notes on each of them, ranking them from most to least dangerous. Maybe the others could tell that she was visually dissecting them, because her table seemed to fill up awfully slow. 

Finally the bell rang, and the teacher passed out schedules. Math, English, German, just a bunch of boring stuff. Beej said that in middle schools in the Netherworld you learned cool stuff like Potions, Summoning, Scream Inducing, and Taxes. It was like Hogwarts. Why couldn’t she go to cool classes in the Netherworld? She had dual citizenship after she saved the mayor that one time during an adventure she was  _ never  _ telling 4/6ths of her parents about. 

Two seconds into her teacher’s grand welcoming speech and she was already zoning out, bored. She was both bored  _ and  _ scared. Bad combo, Lydia. Finally they played a little ‘get to know you’ game, because of course they did, and Lydia rolled her eyes as she realized that she was going to have to memorize the dumb hobbies of all of her classmates. 

“Why don’t you tell us your name, your favorite subject, and your favorite hobby!” Ms. Clapton cheered, clapping her hands. Wow, how friendly. Lydia hated friendly people. School already sucked. 

Everyone went around the room - “Hi, I’m Kayden/Braeden/Jayden/Madden/Hazelnut and my hobby is skiing/football/fishing/video games/skiing and my favorite subject is recess/recess/recess/recess” - before they finally got to her. 

She stood up, trying to be proud. “My name is Lydia Deetz, my favorite subject is Art, and my hobby is vulturing!”

She sat back down. Everyone stared at her, with big bug eyes. Not literally. 

“Vulturing?” Her teacher finally asked. “What’s that, Lydia?”

“It’s when you take bones you find on big streets and you put them in a lot of chemicals with adult supervision and at the end of it you have big cool bones,” Lydia said promptly. “I have a raccoon! His name is Pancake.”

Everyone stared at her. Lydia wondered if she had said something wrong. 

“That’s very nice,” her teacher finally said. “Okay, who’s next?”

But they kept on staring at her, long after the next student (“Pistachio and my hobby is video games and my favorite subject is recess”) went, and Lydia couldn’t help but wonder if she had done something strange and unusual again. 

She had wanted to be normal this year. She wanted good friends, who would have sleepovers with her. Kids who her parents were happy to see, friends who didn’t make her parents wince whenever she said their name  _ only  _ one time. 

She drew big eyes in her notebook, and imagined that they blinked back at her, and resolved not to pay any more attention for the rest of class. Homeroom was boring, anyway. Everything was going to be just like elementary school. 

During math when the teacher was passing out a really complicated list of things their parents needed to buy a boy leaned over in his seat next to her. 

“Hey,” the boy said. He had long blonde hair, and had a generally sandy, untrustworthy vibe to him. His teeth were crooked, but pearly white. “Is it true that you collect bodies?  _ Dead  _ bodies?”

“Only the bones,” Lydia said easily. “I take pictures of them. Do you wanna see the pictures? They’re in my backpack.”

The boy stared at her, with wide chocolate brown eyes. “....yeah,” he eventually admitted, and Lydia quickly unzipped her Catra pocket and spread the pictures out over the table. 

“This one’s Pancake,” Lydia said, jabbing her finger at the first one as the boy leaned over. The two other girls at the table, who had been pretending not to listen in on the conversation, craned their heads as they pretended that they were avidly listening to the teacher drone on about mechanical pencils. “And  _ this  _ one is Spongebob. He’s a velociraptor.”

“Like, a real one?” A girl asked. She was black, with a lot of thin braids with colorful butterfly clips slung over her shoulder and arching eyebrows. “A  _ real  _ velociraptor?”

“Were you here when the demons took over our town for two weeks?” Lydia asked promptly. “Cars kept on running the little ones over, so after they all went away I collected them and put them in chemicals. I sell them for two hundred dollars on eBay. I bought my Steven Universe toys with the money.”

“Can I see your Steven Universe toys?” said another girl. 

“Can I see that photograph?” the boy asked. 

“How much for a velociraptor,” the first girl said. 

Lydia grinned. 

  
  


The thing was:

Okay, so maybe Lydia  _ had  _ plunged her entire sleepy New England town into a hell dimension. So what? Connecticut was boring. Nothing good was on TV, Mommy was dead and she was sad, and Daddy was kissing his new girlfriend and was too busy to play ‘Shake Senora’ with her. They were too big on gazebos and had no beaches. She had to spice the place up.

The thing was that the town didn’t really go back to normal. Sure, she pouted and crossed her arms and refused to play with Beej until he cleaned the place up, and that girl scout was fine eventually with very little memory of her new traumatic experience, but things didn’t go back to  _ normal.  _ Beej said that the ‘line between dimensions was thin now’ and ‘I may have broken something, but don’t panic’ and ‘it’s possible you all have demon rabies these days but it’s curable so no biggie’. Sometimes demons just...slipped out. Sometimes water turned into eels and Lydia hadn’t even  _ done  _ anything. Very frequently, Lydia had done something and she and Beej had to clean it up before Daddy and Delia and the Maitlands found out. That happened a lot, actually. Lydia spent a lot of her vacation being very bored, sneaking around and hanging out with Beej, accidentally flattening half the houses in town under a giant cheese wheel, and then having to destroy the cheese before her parents found out and pop the houses back to normal before they got sued or something. Life was never boring, but it was frequently infested with singing maggots that wanted to unionize. 

Lydia learned a lot about worker’s rights that day. 

But it was okay because it was like every day was Halloween! And Halloween itself was...it was a little traumatic, but it was mostly  _ very  _ fun. Sometimes a little too much fun. And the Netherworld was cool too. But the Maitlands got  _ really mad  _ if they found out that she and Beej had snuck off to the Netherworld to play and they usually pulled her back by her ear and yelled at Beej all the way home. The entire government of the Netherworld owed her a blood debt after she solved the Sphinx’s Riddles Three, so it wasn’t actually  _ dangerous,  _ but try telling the Maitlands that! They worried too much. 

But it wasn’t vacation any more, and Lydia needed to graduate high school if she ever wanted to be the first person to make a documentary about the Netherworld that didn’t lie like that lame-o boring book  _ Dante’s Inferno.  _ Beej read it to her as a bedtime story when she couldn’t sleep at night. He was good about making the tortured souls in the funny pictures dance the jig of the damned. He also played a mean fiddle to go along with the lyrics. 

Making all the dogs in their sleepy little town talk, but then making them evil, was hilarious. But Lydia wasn’t a kid anymore. She had  _ responsibilities.  _

These responsibilities unfortunately bit her in the butt when a big kid stopped by her English classroom and gave a note to her teacher. Mr. Henderson, who so far had been very obligingly not noticing Lydia’s black market sale of the Ziploc baggie of Gremlin horns she kept in her worm shaped pencil case (Its name was Mr. Worm), cleared his throat and called her name before pointing to the big kid. She had made fifty dollars just that period, and it was with great regret that Lydia stood up to go follow the kid.

The kid, who was probably an eighth grader, guided her down the hallway and eventually deposited her in front of a friendly looking door. 

“You can get back, right? Cool,” the kid said. She eyed the baggie of bones that stuck out of Lydia’s pocket. “Are you supposed to have those?”

“The student handbook doesn’t say anything about wiccan spiritualist trade,” Lydia said sweetly. “Are you infringing on my religion?”

“Whatever.” The big kid rolled her eyes. “One of those nasty gremlin things was eating my hazelnut butter. Good riddance. See ya. Have fun with Thomas.”

Then she was left alone with Thomas, and Lydia reluctantly entered the room. 

It was Delia all over the place. Posters about counting your breath to ten, kitties hanging from branches, tapestries from walls, lots of toys and blankets and throw pillows. The complete works. The room screamed ‘Friendly To Children!’. Lydia felt hideously catered too. 

“Lydia!” Thomas said, swiveling away from his computer. He was a white, middle aged man, with a buzzcut and a white button up shirt tucked into jeans. He looked like he ate at gentrified mac and cheese restaurants where they serve you food on skillets. His glasses were big and horned rimmed, and disguised his watery blue eyes that blinked like an owl. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Do you remember me?”

“Yes,” Lydia said, disgruntled. He had been at the meeting when they set up her IEP. For the special kids. Lydia knew she was special, because Beej and the Mayor of the Netherworld and The Holy Guards One Of Which Speaks Only The Truth And The Other Speaks Only Lies told her so, but it always felt so gross when adults in suits said it. “How can I forget.”

“It’s good to see you again,” Thomas said, disgustingly genuine. “Please, take a seat anywhere. I just wanted to chat with you real quick about your year here at Poe Middle.”

Lydia sat in the armchair, as far away from him as possible, and hugged a pillow to her chest. Two wolves battled within her: one didn’t want to go to therapy. The other one wanted to miss as much English as possible. “What’s there to talk about,” Lydia muttered, scraping her Mary Jane shoe on the carpet. “I'm fine. I said that at the meeting.”

“Yes, but now I want to talk about you. Just you. I printed out your file -” he slapped the ream of paper an inch thick on the desk next to him. “ - so I thought we could review it a little bit. That sound good?”

“Sounds swell,” Lydia said, as sarcastically as she could. Daddy said that eleven year olds could really master the sarcasm. She was very proud of it. Beelzebub had taught her how to roll her eyes the perfect way. 

Thomas checked his clipboard carefully, large horn rimmed glasses balanced on the edge of his big nose. “It says here...hmmm...you plunged the town into a ‘living hell’?”

“I’m supposed to say Netherworld because hell is scary for little girls,” Lydia said promptly. 

“Ah. Yes. Hm. I remember that. My taps turned into snakes.” Thomas made another note on his clipboard. “But you’ve been okay since then.”

“Yeah, I’m good now.”

“Alright.” Thomas scratched away at his clipboard. What was he writing? Maybe she could bribe some rats to steal his notes. “I see your grades from elementary are very good. No extracurriculars. Do you keep in contact with any of your old friends from elementary, Lydia?”

“Sure I do,” Lydia fibbed. She kept in contact with one, so it wasn’t technically a lie. It wasn’t her fault all of her good for nothing friends had ditched her after The Worst Fourth Grade Year Anybody Had Ever Had Ever. Delia had called them ‘Fair Weather Friends’. They all made her stop doing that very quickly, because it was dangerous to use colorful idioms in front of Beej. He tended to take them literally. 

“Uh huh. What about your home life, Lydia? How are things with your step-mother?”

Lydia wrinkled her nose. “Delia’s not my mom. She’s a ‘friend to children everywhere’.” She made sure to make the air quotes. Exact words. “But she’s okay, I guess. I talk about my hobbies and she pretends to care, so when she talks about her hobbies I pretend to care. She takes me shopping at Yankee Candle sometimes.”

“Do you like shopping?”

“I like eating the candles.”

“Okay, then. Do you have any other adults in your life? Aunts, uncles, grandparents?”

Lydia stifled a giggle. “The ghosts who live in my attic make me breakfast. Do they count?”

Thomas peered over his glasses at her, raising an eyebrow. “Lydia, dear. You know we aren’t supposed to acknowledge the ghosts.”

“Can I acknowledge my demon foster daddy who I bullied into looking after me while we have adventures in H-E-double hockey sticks?” Lydia asked innocently. 

“Much better.” Thomas made a note in his clipboard. “It’s all about the Three As, Lydia. Adaption, Absorption -”

“Adoption?”

“Definitely not that.” Thomas sighed, putting his clipboard down on his lip. He steepled his fingers, looking over them. His eyes glimmered in the soft yellow desk lamp, like beetles rustling their wings under his eyelashes. “You’re a big girl, Lydia. Can I be honest with you?”

“I’ll give you a freebie, Doc,” Lydia lectured, “it’s  _ not  _ a good idea to tell me your True Name.”

“I think you’re deflecting,” Thomas said. At her flat look, he quickly followed up, “I think you’re avoiding telling me what’s wrong. Your mother’s death really disrupted your elementary school experience. And I just want you to have the best possible time at Poe. I think it might be a good idea for you to sign up for some extracurriculars, maybe join some clubs. We want a nice, well-adjusted girl. Wouldn’t you like to be that girl, Lydia?”

“But I’m not that girl,” Lydia said, confused and more than a little hurt. It’s not like she minded talking about Mommy - just the opposite, really - but having gross grown-ups do it just felt nosy. “I don’t want to pretend to be someone I’m not just to make you feel better about having a kid who doesn’t fit. I don’t even want to see a dumb therapist.”

“There’s no need to get defensive, Lydia -”

“I’m not defensive!” Lydia yelled, defensively. “I just don’t care about your stupid rules! It’s not like I don’t want to make friends!”

“There’s lots of ways to make friends, Lydia,” Thomas lectured, “that don’t involve starting a black market in your classroom. Have you thought about playing Polly Pockets instead?”

“Ugh! You are so dumb!” Lydia hopped off her unfortunately extremely cushy armchair, shoving the very comfortable throw pillow back in its place. “I resign from therapy forever. I am going back to English now. The syllabus is more interesting than you are!”

She didn’t even wait for him to write her a hall pass before she stormed out of the room. To her horrible, big and awful embarrassment, she found her eyes burning. 

Even worse, she didn’t know the way back to her classroom. She only realized this after she had already stomped down three very unfamiliar hallways. It turned out that all the hallways in middle school looked the same. Same brick walls painted with a thin coat of ugly white Delia would turn up her nose at, same grey concrete floors. It made her dizzy and turned her around, and soon she wanted to cry even more because she was lost and she would never get back to English in time and Mr. Henderson was going to call her a bad kid even though she wasn’t, not really. Mr. Henderson was going to hate her and none of the kids were going to want to be friends with her just because her mom was dead and she couldn’t be normal again, like it was some ugly black mark on her soul everyone could see except for her. 

Sometimes her sadness felt like a dripping brand, marking her as Different and Wrong and Broken to everyone around her. Like toys that came out a bit wonky, adults just wanted to dump her in the trash bin and start again with someone who wasn’t so damaged. Lydia didn’t know what was so wrong with her. Was it Pancake?

She finally found a bathroom, and she quickly ran into it as she sniffled. Acting on impulse, she did the first thing that came to mind. Her first option in case of an emergency, her only line of defense, her last solution. 

She turned out the lights, plunging the dirty girl’s bathroom into darkness except for light filtering in through the yellowed high window. She stood in front of the mirror and turned around three times, squeezing her eyes tight. 

“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!”

When she opened her eyes she saw only her reflection. Pasty, little Lydia Deetz, with bat and kitty clips in her hair and black fingerless gloves over her spider-silk poncho. Except, wait - she wasn’t  _ that  _ pale. Her face seemed sunken in, her eyes nothing more than hollow holes. Her reflection opened her mouth, and blood spurted out through cracked and broken teeth. 

The Lydia Deetz in the mirror was nothing more than skin stretched over a skeleton, oozing blood and black tar, moaning softly. Her hair was stringy and fell in matted rope, and a haunted screeching echoed through the brick walls. Pus bubbled and oozed in open sores in her face, and Lydia watched as her reflection’s face began to melt and decompose before her eyes. Maggots threaded their way through the empty eye socks, nibbling away at sunken lips, and her reflection’s skeleton begged for release with silent eyes. 

Then the reflection reached out a hand, and  _ broke free of the mirror.  _

Except the hand was a gross bluish-white pudy hand, and when the reflection stepped through the mirror it was only old Beetlejuice. He looked very proud of himself, because “Evil is all about Presentation, Baby!”, but Lydia was crying too hard from her complicated feelings to really answer him. 

His face immediately fell at the sight of Lydia crying. “Babe! Did you even look at the Bloody Mary? Did you even  _ appreciate?  _ You’re crying too hard for a good spook!”

Lydia just cried harder. 

“Kiddo, I love seeing kids crying. I do! But you don’t even look scared, just all mopey! C’mon, Lydia, what’s wrong?” Beej looked around, perched perfectly on the bathroom sink, hands on his hips. “Oh. We’re in a girl’s bathroom. No shiz you’re upset. This is the crucible of teenage girlhood, you know. Did some Regina George mothereffer make fun of your poncho? I’ll replace her tongue with a giant cockroach attached to her muscular system.”

“Everyone’s been really nice,” Lydia sobbed, “and they’re giving me a lot of money for my bones! I really like middle school!”

Beej stared at her, blinking with his double eyelids. “Oh, my bad,” he said sarcastically. “Makes perfect sense, then. Forgive me for thinking tween girls operated on Planet Earth logic. Let me read back up on Planet Venus logic.” He quickly poofed a thin, pop-science style book into his hands. In big letters on the front it read ‘COMPLETE DISSERTATION OF THE LOGIC OF PLANET VENUS WOMEN: AND WHY THEY WON’T HAVE SEX WITH YOU’. “Wait, shiz, wrong book, hold on.” The book popped away and another one replaced it, this time reading ‘COMPLETE DISSERTATION OF THE LOGIC OF PLANET VENUS TEENAGE GIRLS AND WHY YOUR DAUGHTER NO LONGER WANTS TO GO ON FATHER-DAUGHTER FISHING TRIPS AND HEAR ABOUT YOUR DAY AT WORK: ITS BECAUSE YOU WERE ABSENT WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD AND LEFT MOST OF THE BURDEN OF CHILDCARE ON HER TARANTULA MOTHER’. “Okay, uh, says here that it’s because I haven’t been attending to...your mother’s egg sacs...you know what, forget it.” Beej threw the book over his shoulder. “Lyds, speak to me. You know that if the tracer implanted under your skin by your folks starts beeping because you’re in physical or emotional distress your Aunt Barbie rips my head from my shoulders. What’s wrong. Use your flesh tongue.”

Lydia forced herself to calm down, and when Beej desperately pulled a Sandworm Lollipop from his elbow and gave it to her she was able to lick the marshmallow and settle down into sniffles. She gnawed on the chocolate leg and sulkily detailed her entire day to him, ignoring the way he slid down off the sink and leaned against the mirror. He had no reflection, and made a big show out of being bored by her meticulous recounting of her day, but she could tell by the way that his eyes kept nervously flickering to her tracer that he was invested in her happiness. 

Beej was a big softy. He hid it by being mean, but he was the first one to give her sand from the planet where the Aliens who built the Empire State Building were from when she was having a cement phase. He just didn’t like anyone to know that he was easily manipulated. 

“ - and then they said that you couldn’t be there to see me off to school despite it being a pivotal moment in my life because it’s not outlined in the custody agreement,” Lydia pouted, crossing her arms. “But we hang out outside the custody agreement all the time, so what’s the big deal? You get me every first weekend of the month and during holidays!”

Beej squeezed the bridge of his nose and took a large, unnecessary breath. When he exhaled it sounded a little like a Whoopie Cushion. “Kid. Please. I am begging you. On my hands and knees. Repeat after me. The custody agreement was a  _ lie.  _ I did it to  _ manipulate you.  _ Half of the text was smiley faces because you were ten and could barely read.”

“I wrote over the smiley faces with my own rules,” Lydia pointed out. “That’s why you buy me ice cream.”

“I wanted citizenship in the real world and not even Hell lets you marry ten year olds so it was literally my only option,” Beej said sullenly. “You know, I could have been in any universe. Infinite options of space in front of me. I could have been born into the cool reality where you’re this nice sixteen year old and I could just green card marry you. Nothing personal, kid, it was just business. But no. I’m stuck with the baby lawyer, loan shark, read-the-fine-print little witch who twists our agreement for  _ her own personal amusement.  _ Now I have to show up at  _ family court.  _ Me! I’ve been avoiding the justice system for millennia, and the one thing that drags me in front of a judge is the baby and the sexy ghosts asking for child support. It’s like Al Capone getting hooked for tax evasion. It’s criminal.”

“You love me,” Lydia said smugly. “Admit it, Beej. You’re weak for me.”

Beetlejuice moaned. “Whipped by a baby. Not even in the fun way.”

“What’s the fun way? Like with horses?”

“Never mind about that,” Beej said quickly, “forget I said anything. God, kid, I can’t wait until you’re an adult and you can get half of my jokes. We’ll have some real fun then.”

“We don’t have fun now?” Lydia asked, hurt.

“Fudge it! Never mind!” Beetlejuice sighed, and gave her an affectionate noogie that made her giggle and bat his hands away. “Come on, chin up, girlie. Who’s my best meatsack?”

Lydia giggled. “Me?”

“Duh!” He cracked his knuckles, and Lydia watched in fascination as the bones popped out of his skin and popped back in. “Just let me know who to punch. Please tell me it’s a baby. I just love punching orphans. Who’s gonna complain, right?”

Lydia sighed, melancholy again. “I already started an illegal trading ring of corpses.”

“Atta girl!” Beej cheered. “Where’s my cut!”

“Call it child support,” Lydia said waspishly. “And that was going good, right? But then that dumb therapist Thomas Whateverson starts giving me a lot of shiz about Dead Mom and how I’m troubled now. Like I’m a  _ bad kid. _ ” Her traitorous lip wobbled. “I’m not a bad kid, am I, Beej?”

“Kiddo,” Beej said, sounding somewhat flabbergasted. Which was pretty impressive. It was hard to shock The Ghostest with the Mostest. “You sent your town to hell.”

“I was bored,” Lydia mumbled. “And Aunt Barb says you aren’t supposed to say H-E-double hockeysticks around me.”

“Okay. Netherworld. Whatever. Potato fay-mine, Potato fah-mine,” Beej waved a hand. “Point is, of course you’re a bad kid! That’s what makes you barely tolerable! So go crazy with it, go stupid! Eat nothing but peanut butter, fudge the system, kill god, kid! C’mon, what do I always say?”

“No morals, no messages, no gods, no masters,” Lydia parroted obediently. 

“Duh! So who cares what Mr. Snakes In a Suit thinks?” Beej paused. “He literally is a bunch of snakes in a suit, by the way, we might want to deal with that sometime. Look, the point is: so long as you muck with your taxes right, they can’t catch ya. Who needs normal when you can do this?” Beej popped his head off his shoulders and spun it around a little before plopping it back on his neck. “Eh? Eh? Normal’s for the Maitlands, kid. Stick with me and you’ll go far. And legally, the first weekend of the month and during holidays: you have to!”

“But what if I want to be normal?” Lydia cried, and Beej stopped short. “What if I want friends who will have sleepovers with me and do my hair? What if I want to stop seeing a therapist and join a dumb club? You were my only friend for years, Beej! I care about you, but I’m lonely!” She sobered a little, fighting back embarrassing sniffles. “I love being strange and unusual. Mommy was strange and unusual and she was the best in everything, and - and you’re strange, and my family is really unusual because I have a stepmom and ghosts make me pancakes. But I have feelings too. Being goth shouldn’t mean having to hide liking normie stuff. I don’t wanna be special ed for the rest of my life. Turning shoelaces into snakes isn’t  _ doing  _ it for me anymore. I’m in middle school now.”

They stared at each other, in awkward silence, punctuated only by the moans of the damned that always echoed a little bit whenever Beej showed up. Lydia has the sinking feeling that whatever she had meant to say, she hadn’t said it right. 

The truth was, Lydia couldn’t be anything other than herself. She would never fit into neat little boxes. But that was okay, because nobody really did. Families are messy but sometimes they’re all that you have, and it wasn’t worth trying to be somebody you’re not just so the other kids will like you. That was what Degrassi said. 

But Lydia had done the whole pretend-I-don’t-need-nobody thing. It hadn’t turned out super great. She knew what she wanted. And sometimes even the gothest girl in school wanted a dumb sleepover. Sometimes time passed, and months turned into seasons turned into years, and you got sick of playing in the mud of your grief. After two years, even Lydia moved on. 

She was big now. She has responsibilities, like syllabi and mechanical pencils and binders and more homework. And sometimes it felt like all Beetlejuice wanted was a playmate. Not Lydia. 

Was this the point where Wendy Darling stopped being able to see fairies? Where Susan stopped being able to step into Narnia? When she decided she was too old for childish fun and she put it all away for grown-up things?

Lydia would never do that. But she promised her Mommy she would live. Sometimes living meant desk lamps and rubber erasers and wiping down dry erase boards at the end of the day. 

“Okay,” Beej said finally. “Yeah, that’s fine. No sweat. Middle school. Yep.  _ Way  _ too old to turn tongues into cockroaches.”

“Beej, I will want to turn tongues into cockroaches as long as I live,” Lydia said fervently, “because that is super cool and people deserve it sometimes. But -”

“It’s fine! Whatever! Ignore ol’ BJ. Like everyone else does.” Beej conjured a comically large hanky, dabbing at his very dry eyelid. Lydia rolled her eyes. “Like when your ghost parents dumped me.”

“They never dated you.”

“Like when they refused to date me. Like all the rest. Women and men and other miscellaneous genders and bug species are all the same!”

“Ugh! You’re impossible!” Lydia stamped her foot. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! Go away, I have class!”

“Don’t they all!” Beej yelled loudly, and poofed away, leaving only the scent of sulfur and intense guilt coiling in Lydia’s stomach behind. 

  
  
  


The rest of the day just wasn’t the same. Nothing ever was, when Beej was mad at her. Despite all of his whinging and moaning (sometimes with chains), it was hard to actually upset him. When she did, it felt extra bad. 

Even so, the rest of the day was nice. At lunch some other girls invited her to sit with them for the first time in years because they wanted to see her Garnet action figures. During Art the teacher seemed really interested in her photography. In German she could say ‘Guten Tag!’ better than anyone in the class. 

Beej would have said that this was all dumb, boring stuff. But it didn’t feel dumb and boring to Lydia. It was actually kind of nice. Not the same kind of nice as turning all nails in the city into soft, moldable cheese, but still pretty good. 

When she went home it was with three new phone numbers in her phone. There was a spring in her Mary Janes, and her poncho seemed lighter and more fluttery than usual. Was this what being a normie was like? It wasn’t as bad as Beej had always said it was. 

When she clamored into Delia’s car, Delia seemed almost afraid to ask her how her day went. Maybe her entire family had been taking bets on if she would infest the school with plague rodents or something. But instead Lyida got to to tell her about her new friends, and her new black market bone trade, and how she said the best ‘Guten Tag’ in the German class. Delia seemed really happy, and when they went grocery shopping at Whole Foods she let her pick out a chocolate croissant. Lydia nibbled on the chocolate croissant as she helped Delia grab gluten free pancake mix and protein powder and lots and lots of vegetables. Delia had found new recipes on Pinterest that Lydia wasn’t sure was edible, so she managed her bargain her down to vegan Mac and Cheese. They talked about Delia’s day at work where she worked part time in a Wiccan shop and the funny things her friends at the meditation center were doing. Lydia liked having a stepmom who worked at the Wiccan store. It gave her good discounts and seemed like a really fun place to work. It made Delia a great person to talk with about the best herb to use for demon summoning. The store had been so busy lately they might even hire her full time. 

Delia was cool. Lydia hadn’t really liked her at first because Daddy had hired her as a nanny/child therapist/grief counselor/life coach when she was qualified for exactly none of those things, but they bonded over a shared enjoyment of the mystical and unknown. Daddy was so uptight and grouchy all the time it was nice to have someone else to loosen him up. She was just a big friend who sometimes occasionally told her to do things as Lydia pretended to listen. Theirs was a fragile balance. Hearing that she and Daddy was marrying and sent her into a tantrum that may or may not have sent the town to hell, but at least she had been allowed to wear a black bridesmaid dress at the wedding. 

Then they went home, Lydia snapping open the bag of Skinny Pop that they bought and chowing down on the gluten free popcorn, and Lydia rushed upstairs to the attic the minute she was done putting away all the groceries. She still had a list of school supplies she needed, but she wasn’t sure if the online Halloween store sold spooky mechanical pencils. She could ask. If needed maybe Beej - but he was probably just going to make her pencil lead scream whenever she used it - but he was mad at her, so she couldn’t. 

The attic of the Maitlands-Deetz house (“We were here first!”) was Lydia’s favorite place in the house. It was huge, spanning the entire house, and had a high arched ceiling that Lydia knew she would be able to comfortably walk under even when she finally hit her growth spurt. It was ringed with boxes, cardboard pushing up against the walls, but there were also huge bookshelves and a small crafts table and a TV and a couch and two desks for laptops and a huge pile of knitting. 

Aunt Barbara was sitting on the couch with her knitting right now watching the flickering of the television. Sometimes she would get too distracted in the show and forget to knit with her fingers, but the needles would keep clacking together without her. It was Aunt Barbara who made her poncho, and she told Lydia that she knitted a lot of love into it. Lydia could tell. Uncle Adam was bent over his laptop, writing Novel Attempt #5. She tried not to disturb him when he was doing this, because sometimes he got really into it. Writers were tortured. From what Beej told her about the Parts Of Hell She Wasn’t Allowed In, that was very literal. 

“Hi, honey!” Aunt Barbara said, without looking away from the TV. She patted one hand beside her on the couch (the needles kept clacking), and Lydia eagerly shucked her backpack and fell next to her. The couch creaked, a small puff of dust spurt up when she sat down, and Lydia sneezed. Aunt Barbara frowned. “Oh, dear. We really should remember to dust more frequently. Sorry about that.”

“No worries,” Lydia coughed. “What are you watching?”

“You know, I don’t even really know,” Aunt Barbara said, sounding a little confused herself. She flicked a finger and pulled up the TV Guide. “Oh, Friends! How great, this was my favorite show when I was alive. I loved Phoebe’s funny little antics.”

“I know,” Lydia said politely. Aunt Barbara was usually watching Friends when she came in. Lydia got the impression she didn’t really pay too much attention to the TV. “Can we watch Steven Universe?”

Aunt Barbara smiled and flicked her finger again, and the TV fuzzed out until it flickered back to her favorite TV show. She picked up her knitting again, seeming to pay more attention to it now. The Maitlands were usually really good about being present when Lydia or her parents were around, but they confessed that if they got too bored time just seemed to slip away sometimes. It scared her a little. Sometimes they thought she was still ten. But so did Daddy, so maybe that wasn’t that big of a deal. “How was your first day at school? Unless you don’t want to talk about it.”

“It was great!” Lydia enthused. “I made so much money fleecing suckers!”

“Lydia,” Uncle Adam said, without looking up from his laptop. 

Lydia sighed. “Providing valuable goods and services to my classmates,” she repeated. “But we had English, and Math, and German, and Art! Tomorrow we’re going to have English again, World Cultures, PE, and Science! It’s a block schedule! It’s kinda confusing, but I think it’s gonna be fun. I want to buy my school supplies from the Halloween store.”

“I’m sure we can manage that,” Aunt Barbara said. “I’m glad you had a good time. Middle school is really different from elementary school, you know. There’s going to be more homework, and they’re going to ask for a lot more responsibility from you. You think you can handle that?”

Her words reminded Lydia very forcibly of the worst part of her day, and Lydia couldn’t help but sigh and slink down lower in her seat. Yesterday she had planned to spend all of her time after school and before dinner hanging with Beej, but now he wasn’t going to even want to see her. What if he never wanted to see her again? What if Halloween came and went and he didn’t even show up? He  _ loved  _ Halloween. It was their  _ thing.  _

She wasn’t going to cry again, because despite today’s production Lydia was almost a teenager and teenagers didn’t cry, but Aunt Barbara clearly noticed her getting upset. She put her knitting down, frowning at Lydia. This is the point where Mommy would have given her a hug, but Delia was a germaphobe and Aunt Barbara didn’t have a corporeal form. So Aunt Barbara just frowned at her, and looked very strongly as if she wanted to hug her. 

“Oh, Lydia, what’s wrong? Is it the other kids? If they’re bullying you, just remember that sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you.”

“Idiom,” Uncle Adam said, closing his laptop and swiveling around. 

Aunt Barbara winced. “Oops! Sorry.”

Everyone but Lydia looked anxiously around, afraid that their words were going to turn into colorful sticks, but Lydia just glared at the TV and tried hard not to be upset again. 

They both looked at her with creased foreheads, but Lydia just dragged her finger through the thick line of dust in the couches. “Promise you won’t get mad?” Lydia asked. 

Then the Maitlands looked at each other, having a conversation with their eyebrows, and finally Uncle Adam sighed. “If this is about...uh, the Ghost With The Most -”

“Ghostie With The Mostie,” Lydia corrected. 

Technically you had to say the name three times uninterrupted to summon him. But if you said his name even once he could generally tell that you were talking about him. Say it twice, and he went way too in detail about the tingling sensation down his spine. It was best to avoid it altogether. Besides, then Lydia could make up fun nicknames. 

“Your friend,” Uncle Adam said firmly, “then I’ve told you before that I want you to feel like you can tell us anything. If you get into trouble because you did something that we don’t want you to, we would rather you tell us so we can help you get out of trouble then you try to handle it yourself.”

“If you ever drink underage at a party, call us right away and we’ll come pick you up,” Aunt Barba lectured. “Never drink and drive or get in a car with someone who has!”

“That was a fantastic parenting moment and I am so proud of you and love you so much, but she’s eleven. Let’s worry about that in five years.”

“Oh!” Aunt Barbara nodded quickly. “Remember that in five years, Lydia!”

“I will,” Lydia said, just to change the subject. Really, she didn’t tell the Maitlands...most of what she did, but they tried really hard and she respected that. Like the Mothman said, effort was everything in a relationship. “It’s just...okay, so it is about him. We kind of...got into a fight, I guess.”

Uncle Adam looked very pained. “Lydia, you know what I said about fencing on school property. Or fencing with someone who doesn’t know how squishy alive girls can be.”

“Not that kind of fight!”

She detailed some of the conversation to them, mostly the part where she said that she wanted to try partaking in normie activities and Beej took it as her saying she didn’t want to be friends anymore. Which wasn’t true! She always wanted to be friends with him! But she would never make new friends at her school if she turned all of the partners in her group projects into colorful lizards. 

“I just don’t want to have to choose,” Lydia said finally. She rubbed her fingers against the ridging of the couch, wondering if it smelled like the Maitlands. It was their old couch. When the Deetzes had moved in they had found a lot of Barbara and Adam’s stuff in the attic, and it was only when they tried taking it out that the real trouble started. Everything was okay now, though. They had all become friends. “It’s not fair if I have to pick between other friends and my best friend. I shouldn’t have to choose between Earth and the Netherworld. Why can’t I have both? What’s wrong with that?”

“Besides it being unnatural and slowly ruining the fabric of reality?” Uncle Adam asked. 

“Yeah!”

“Honey, any friend that makes you pick between them and your happiness is a bad friend,” Aunt Barbara said firmly. “Imagine if your Uncle Adam told me while we were dating that I couldn’t hang out with my college friends because he didn’t like them. Wouldn’t that be mean of him!”

“You would dump his butt!” Lydia said. 

“I would dump his butt,” Aunt Barbara agreed. Uncle Adam looked very scandalized at the prospect of any hypothetical version of himself being so dumb and mean. “But if my college friends told me that they didn’t like my weekly date nights with Adam, then that wouldn’t be very nice of them either. It sounds like BJ just wants you all for himself.”

“I’m his only friend,” Lydia protested. “I don’t  _ blame  _ him…”

“That’s his own fault,” Uncle Adam pointed out. “You aren’t responsible for his decisions. And you aren’t obligated to be the kind of person he wants you to be. Just like you aren’t obligated to be the kind of person your school counselor wants you to be, or even the person your parents and Barbara and I want you to be. Your only obligation to be the best version of Lydia Deetz there is. If BJ was really your friend, then he would know that.”

It was good advice, and Lydia gave both her ghost parents a big air hug over it. She stayed with them a little bit longer as she explained what was going on in the latest Steven Universe to Aunt Barbara, who thought that Connie was very adorable and that Steven was a good role model, before she grabbed her backpack and went back downstairs. She made herself a quick snack of popcorn and rice cakes before taking a teetering pile of rice cakes into her bedroom and shutting the door. 

She dumped the snacks on her bed, although Delia kept on telling her that she would get ants that way, and opened the bottom drawer of her desk. She removed all of her old notebooks and pencils from elementary school and dug her fingernails into the side of the drawer, and she carefully took out the false bottom of the drawer and withdrew the single sheet of paper in the bottom before flopping onto her bed and spreading the paper out in front of her. 

It wasn’t exactly paper. It was more like parchment, except instead of being made out of animal skin it was made out of the skin of something unidentifiable. Beej had said that it was actually more like something called ‘vellum’, and ‘don’t worry about what the ink’s made out of just freaking sign or we aren’t ordering pizza’. Most of it was written in splattered ink, but there was a lot of edits made in one of her pencils with a big eraser at the end shaped like a cute skeleton head. The entire thing had eventually been rewritten by the judge at family court and filed away, but this was the rough draft that she and Beej had made together. Well, that Beej had made, and that she had edited after she snuck Nyquil into the nasty beer he drank so he couldn’t catch her. 

She re-read it carefully. 

Soul Bonding Agreement Of The Lower Nine Courts Of [REDACTED] (it read): 

On this day, October Seventieth Twelfth, the Court Of All Things Nasty hereby grants custody of stinky human LYDIA DEETZ, a [] Ghoul [] Ghost []Ghast []Republican [X] Other (Please Specify) to their [] Owner [] Slave-Driver [] High Grand Mage [X] Deadbeat Father by the name of LAWRENCE BEETLEJUICE MEET THE BEATLES BEAT THE MEATLES BANANA MANNA FO-FANNA  BETELGEUSE THE UNLOVABLE, henceforth for now and all eternity, legally binding until termination of this contract or one or both parties or until this TOTALLY AWESOME SUGAR HIGH WEARS OFF! WHICH WILL NEVER HAPPEN!. Henceforth, the two parties will be bound in their True Names and in their very ectoplasmic essences HAHA GROSS, allowing transferring between any and all realms using the other as an anchor, for the authorized purposes of [X]mercantilism [X]terrorisim [X]general sins against humanity [X] golfing.

Additional details below, as agreed on by the parties preceding:

Section 1) The party known as Betelgeuse will be the legal arbiter of the well-being, entertainment, and safety of the human known as Lydia Deetz in the Up-There  
Section 1a) The safety of the human known as Lydia Deetz shall require her to be mostly not dead more than she is mostly not not dead

Section 1ab) Dead as defined by humans is a state of being that is difficult to reverse that makes one similar to but not strictly the same as Disco

Section 1b) The following actions are prohibited: Murdering of the human, maiming of the human, slaughter of the human, culling of the human, extermination of the human, whoopsy-doopsying of the human, Category 5 Demonic Summoning, Violet-Class Hexes, and all Curses

Section 2) The party known as Betelgeuse shall see over the human on the following dates, in accordance with the false Up-There calender planted by our agents that one time for kicks:

Section 2a) The first weekend of the lunar calendar and Holidays

Section 2b) When it would be really funny

  
  


Signed, ____________ and ____________ (Please include fingers in attached envelope)

  
  
  
  


Lydia sighed. Simpler days. It had taken her a long time to puzzle out what it was saying, but even at ten she had been a really good reader. Much better than Beej had thought she was, but she also knew that Beej wasn’t too good at human ages and had been under the impression that she was like five or something. 

She  _ knew  _ that their relationship started out with subterfuge (that meant lying). But he liked her more now, and even if they were only legally foster dad and adopted human kid they were still friends. It was weird, but that didn’t make it bad. 

Wait. She reread the contract. It said his name was…’Betelgeuse’? She had thought it was spelled ‘Beetlejuice’! Whoops! She’d been misspelling his name this entire time! No wonder he thought she was such a bad friend!

Lydia groaned, dangling herself over the edge of the bed and pushing aside the gauzy princess curtains so she could dig her diary out from under her mattress. She fished out her sparkly black gel pen with a big pom-pom at the end and whispered a secret to the diary so it unlocked. She flipped to the next clean page, writing in directly underneath her message from the morning. 

_ Dear Diary,  _ Lydia wrote,

_ Update on school: it went very well and I made $200. My revenue for today is: _

_ $200 money in _

  * _$50 chemical expense_

_ = $150 profit.  _

_ Not bad! _

_ I made good friends, which is a treasure beyond measure. I sat with them at lunch. They like Steven Universe too. We talked about our Halloween costumes. It was really good.  _

_ The bad news is that Beej is mad at me. I don’t know what to do. The Maitlands are right (they usually are!) but I also know that they don’t like him because he’s a “bad influence” and “won’t stop asking them out”. (Aunt Barbara is very pretty and I hope I look like her when I grow up but I think “sexy” is a strong word. And re: Uncle Adam, inaccurate.) I’m the only person on his team. If he doesn’t have me, who does he have?  _

_ This is my poem for the day: _

_ The moon shares its tides with the butterflies _

_ Drowning them in pens, pencils, and lies _

_ But if that’s them, then who am I? _

_ Love,  _

_ Lydia. _

Lydia sighed. Her poetry was so amazing. Maybe when she grew up instead of being a photographer she could live in a cabin in the woods and write a lot of really good poetry and own a lot of dogs and never talk to anyone ever again. Daddy wouldn’t get her any pets because the Maitlands tended to scare them too much. The Maitlands said that Beej counted as a pet, “but don’t tell him we said that because he will get ideas”. She didn’t know what that meant. 

She had some light homework to do and preparation for her classes tomorrow, but she was stressed and anxious and didn’t want to do it. She re-hid her diary instead and flipped off her Nightmare Before Christmas desk lamp instead, lying on her bed in the dark. She shook her hair out of its ponytail, but left the clips in even if they dug awkwardly into her scalp. She lay on her covers, staring at the ceiling, trying hard not to think about very much at all.

Maybe she was too successful. Maybe her day had just been too exciting. She didn’t realize it when it happened, but gradually she began to lose grip of consciousness and fall into a troubled sleep. 

  
  
  
  
  


Lydia dreamed of a day almost two years ago. 

She was standing in her living room, jaw dropped, still dressed in the little frilly black dress she had worn for Dead Mommy’s funeral. She had been refusing to wear anything else for months. 

Beetlejuice didn’t make her wear normal clothing. Beetlejuice said that her refusal to clean her clothes was very admirable and awesome of her. That was why he was babysitting her now and maybe for the rest of time? It was unclear, but the last week had happened very quickly. 

But he had done everything she asked. He had chased Daddy and stupid Delia out, and he told her that he was her new babysitter now, and that didn’t she want to have some real fun? And she did! They scared that stupid mean girl Skye from PE who was trying to sell them those dumb cookies, and that US Census Man, and the Pizza Guy, and it wasn’t safe to go out in the streets anymore because the street cleaning machines had all turned into sandworms. But that was okay. Lydia didn’t want to leave the house anyway. 

The house was cool now. It was all haunted. There were bats in the ceiling and whenever she went to the bathroom all the cockroaches had a little dance routine. The Beetle Squad sometimes showed up and did a big dance scene, which was so much fun when she and Beetlejuice sang and danced. There were no more mean adults hanging around, just her and Beetlejuice forever. 

But even though they had a lot of fun over the past few weeks, she wasn’t sure if it was still fun. The house was really messy, for one. Nobody had taken out the trash or done the dishes. There were weird things on the ground and nobody wanted to sweep and Lydia was too small to push the big heavy vacuum they had. She didn’t know how to cook and neither did Beetlejuice, so all she had been eating was peanut butter and Halloween candy. 

It was late at night - maybe, time was kind of losing meaning - and all the lights in the house were off. The only light was from the flickering television that Beetlejuice was conked out in front of. He was surrounded by empty cans of that gross beer Daddy liked to drink, and had cracked open a big straw of Pixie Stix and was...snorting it? That’s not how you ate Pixie Stix.

She stood in front of the TV, putting her hands on her hips and trying to scowl at him. Beetlejuice scowled, craning his head and trying to see the TV from behind her. 

“Beetlejuice, we need to do the dishes. It’s really stinky in the kitchen.”

He burped, still craning his head. “Yeah, sure, whatever. Move out of the way, you’re blocking  _ Jeopardy: This Time, It’s Personal _ .”

“I don’t care about your dumb TV!” Lydia cried. “There’s flies everywhere in the kitchen! And we need to go grocery shopping! I haven’t eaten anything green in weeks!”

“The flies live there. It’s their kitchen now,” Beetlejuice said, unimpressed. He rubbed under his nose, eyes spinning (literally) a little. “Damn, that’s the good fucking shit right there. Really hits the spot. Anyway, we have green food coloring, put it in your peanut butter.”

Lydia gritted her teeth, and made a show of planting her feet. “I’m not moving until you get us some real food. I’m hungry. If I have peanut butter one more time I’m going to  _ throw up. _ ”

“God, anything but that.” Beetlejuice rolled his eyes - literally, he plucked one out and rolled it across his palm to prove a point - and patted the seat on the couch next to him. “Take a fucking seat, babe, and conk out on the boob tube with me. What, you want to go back to scaring? Is that why you’re whining? This is a marathon, not a sprint. We have the next...like, four hundred years to put your entire town in therapy. It’s about patience, girlie.”

“I’m not gonna be alive for four hundred years,” Lydia pointed out. 

“Pussy.” Beetlejuice ripped another line. “Either sit down and watch with me or go away,  _ Hell Big Brother  _ is almost on. This one’s a real riot. You ever see it? We plant cameras in a house and drive the family to madness. This season’s the White House!”

Lydia sighed, but she sat down next to him anyway. She batted away a decomposing, severed hand that pulled on her dress from where it was wedged between the couch cushions, and reluctantly took a sip of the beer he had sitting around before spitting it out. Ugh, so nasty. “Beetlejuice, I think we have to talk,” Lydia said formally. That was how her Daddy always said it when he was mad at her or when she got in trouble at school for the fifth time that week. 

“Don’t say my name,” Beetlejuice said quickly. “Call me Beej. Or BJ! Juicy Juice. Whatever. And whatever you gotta say, save it for commercial break.”

She sat and stewed in silence, silently writing a little speech until commercials. It didn’t take very long: apparently, Hell broadcast television was 30 minutes of TV and two hours of ads. 

Finally, when the first infomercial for dirty diapers began playing, Lydia finally said, “I’ve had a lot of fun the past two weeks.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Beetlejuice - no, Beej, said, before laughing at some joke the spirit of Billy Mays said. Then he laughed when the demon standing behind Billy Mays prodded him with a poker and made him scream. “I’ve worked my ass off to make the past two weeks heaven for gothy little girls. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Uh...thanks?”

“Not that it wasn’t fun for me,” Beej said, almost thoughtfully. “You’re kinda cool, kid. I expected you to be totes boring, but you aren’t a bad hang-out. I didn’t know kids were so cool! It’s bizarre. I’m used to feeding them into woodchippers, but this whole nanny gig ain’t so bad! I bet I was fuckin’ Mary Poppins or some shit in a better life. Man, Mary Poppins could  _ get it _ .”

“You’re cool too and I like your singing and Beetle Squad,” Lydia said politely. That was probably why she could see ghosts: they all seemed to like her a lot. “But I have needs. I still have to go to fourth grade. Otherwise they fail me and I don’t get to graduate high school and I’ll have to be a bum forever. Also I need food. Daddy used to tuck me in at night and it would be nice if you did that too. I can write this down if you want.”

“Your school’s infested by very friendly and highly intelligent tarantulas,” Beej said, waving a hand. “Congrats, kid, I’m writing you a sick day note for the rest of your life. No more school for Lydia Whatever Your Last Name Is.”

“Oh.” Lydia thought about this. “Awesome!”

“School’s lame. I’m an eighth grade drop out myself.” Beej nodded sagely. “Failed Sex Ed. Just too much of a chad for those incels, I guess.”

“But we still need food,” Lydia pointed out. “Can’t we just go grocery shopping? I have some emergency money from my birthday…”

The pizza places weren’t delivering to their house anymore, probably because of what happened to the last pizza guy. Or the one before that. Or the one before that. 

Beej froze, and something approximating intelligent thought crossed his features. Finally, when Billy Mays started mopping up his own tears with a ShamWow, Beej turned to face her. He looked very sympathetic and caring. 

“Aw, jeez, kiddo, I wish I could. The problem is, I can’t leave the house.”

Oh, right. He was locked to the house. Lydia bit her fingernails, very worried about the future for the first time in a while. What were they going to do? “You can’t take me to school or help me buy clothing or do any of the stuff Dead Mommy did,” Lydia said anxiously. “If Mommy was still here it would be okay…” 

Or Daddy, but never mind that. 

“Yep! That sucks!” Beej said enthusiastically. “But there is a solution here, you know. I got One Weird Trick up my sleeve, something that can solve all of the problems I created!”

“Really?” Lydia perked up. “What?”

Beej grinned. It was a very big grin. “Babes,” he gushed, grabbing her hands with his gross old man hands and squeezing. Lydia squirmed, uncomfortable. “I’m finally ready to take the next step. Make our relationship, you know, Myspace official?”

“Uh?” Lydia said. 

“How would you like me to be…” Beetlejuice released her hand and snapped his finger, and the Beetle Squad showed up in marching band outfits carrying big drums and started up a drumroll. “....my new daughter!”

It was like one of the drums had been cracked over her head. “What?” Lydia asked, dazed. “A - daughter? Really?”

“Sure, why not! I got nothing better to do this Friday! We’ll just take a quick jaunt down to the courthouse, sign some new forms, I get to stay in this realm forever and maybe take it over but just a little bit, and boom! You have a hot new dad!” Beej jumped off the couch and posed dramatically, the entire Beetle Squad clapping behind him. “What do you say? Am I ready to be a DILF?”

“But I...have parents,” Lydia said weakly. “Dead Mommy and Daddy...and the Maitlands were really nice. Where...where are the Maitlands?”

“Who cares!” Beetlejuice said quickly. “It’s a win-win situation! You get a fresh new parent who can go outside and buy you stupid stuff like food, and I get….the love and joy of a fantastic new daughter! What d’ya say, kid? Yes or yes?”

“Uh.” Lydia sunk back in the couch. She abruptly wanted to disappear a bit. “I think we should talk to my daddy about this.”

“We chased your daddy out,” Beej said curtly, crossing his arms. “He’s gone. Poof! Just like your Mommy. Face it, babes. You don’t got no parents now. The only person on this Earth who still ‘cares’ about you is me. So how about it?” He whipped out a big fancy looking piece of paper from his pocket, shoving it at her with a fancy ballpoint pen that seemed to be dripping something. Had he already had this prepared? “You wanna sign? If you do we’ll get pizza! Pineapple and snake flavor!”

Lydia eyed the paper skeptically. It smelled weird. Like bugs. And fear. But maybe that was just the judicial system. 

“I think I want to talk to Adam and Barbara about this,” Lydia said slowly. She really didn’t want to hurt his feelings…he was nice, but… “I...want to talk to them before signing anything. Sorry. But I  _ really  _ want to talk to Adam and Barbara.”

Then something weird happened. Beej’s expression got kind of dark. His fingers clenched on the paper. And he snapped his fingers. 

“Okay,” Beej said, “I tried doing this the fun way. For you. Maybe we should do it the  _ other  _ fun way. You know, fun for  _ me. _ Don’t look away, Lyds.”

After that - after what he said he would do to Barbara - there wasn’t much of a choice at all. 

Still. Lydia knew how to outsmart dumb, creepy old men. They always underestimated you just because you were ten and they were way old, because you were small and they were big, and because there was nothing you could do about it. 

At the end of the day, Beej hadn’t been so bad. He had apologized. Their relationship hadn’t gotten off to an aus-pic-ious start (that was the word Aunt Barbara had used, after she finished kicking Beej into the ground), but Lydia had done something mean too. If Daddy and Delia and Aunt Barbara and Uncle Adam could forgive her and give her a big hug, then she could do the same to Beej. Even if nobody else would. 

In retrospect, he had  _ probably  _ been intending to bump her off after they filed the contract, and he probably would have if she hadn’t smiled and hugged him and agreed that she would love a new dad only to drug his beer and fix the contract under flashlight. 

Then she plied him with a lot of Pixie Stix, which got him really happy for some reason, and they had a great big party where she signed the contract with very big letters. But it was  _ her  _ contract. And, in the words of a very triumphant Barbara when she saved her and Uncle Adam from the Netherworld, “Now you’re  _ our  _ bitch.”

The dream fuzzed out. Her dreams had been very vivid for the past couple of years. She had done a lot of reading on ‘lucid dreaming’, and she thought that it was a little like that, only instead of controlling the dream it was more like dreamwalking. Sometimes she could reach the Netherworld this way, though usually Beej had to help her through it. 

Another memory surfaced, the first time she had met him. They were both sitting on the roof of her house, which she definitely had not been allowed on at all. 

“That’s how you summon me,” Beetlejuice had been saying, after a very fun game of charades that had made her laugh for the first time in months. “Saying my name three times. But don’t just start saying it randomly because you feel like it! I might be in the middle of a little something-something, you know. Ocupado, if you know what I mean.” 

Lydia stared at him blankly. “Like...in the bathroom?”

Beetlejuice sighed. “Savage takedown by a baby going in my cringe comp, but fair.”

That hadn’t really meant anything to her, but it had made her laugh again. Maybe that was why she had liked him: he was the first person to make her laugh since Mommy died. 

The thought stayed in her mind, and it was the thought that stayed on her mind even when she blinked back into wakefulness at the sound of Delia calling her for dinner. 

  
  
  


But, of course, the problem was this:

The first day of school had been on September 1st, a Wednesday, and in just two short days Lydia was packing her backpack to stay with Beej for the weekend. She carefully slid her laptop and binders into her backpack, and added a book from her home library ( _ Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe _ ). She didn’t bother packing any clothing, because she had a little closet at Beej’s, but she did add in a lot of granola bars in the front pocket just in case. He hadn’t stopped forgetting to feed her. Sometimes Lydia wondered if he thought that tween girls were chlorophyllic. 

She hadn’t seen him since Wednesday. In almost any other circumstance, she would be worried that he wasn’t going to turn up at all. But years ago he tried skipping out on their weekend because he had a killer hangover, and the aftermath of that had been messy and had involved sending the rug to the cleaner’s, so she knew he would turn up. Even if she wasn’t really looking forward to it. 

He always showed up at sunset on Friday, and when she peeked out the window she saw that it was almost time. She quickly toed on her Doc Martens (Mary Janes were for special occasions) and carefully tucked the switchblade she had gotten as an eleventh birthday present into the pocket under her poncho. She carefully closed and locked her bedroom door, and slid down the banister to find all her parents standing awkwardly and anxiously in the living room. 

By now even Daddy and Delia knew that she and Beej were fighting, and although nobody ever looked really  _ happy  _ to send her off to stay with Beej normally they didn’t all look so panicked about it. Delia was biting her perfectly manicured fingernails as Daddy rustled through  _ Forbes  _ magazine unnecessarily. Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara were standing close together near the fireplace, talking quietly amongst themselves. When Lydia landed gracefully on her feet as she hopped off the banister all conversation abruptly ceased, and all four adults looked at her and looked away. 

“Ready to go!” Lydia said cheerfully, tightening the straps on her She-Ra backpack. Greyskull give her strength. “Have fun with date night, guys!”

Maybe the only positive, in the eyes of her parents, about this whole thing was that both Daddy and Delia and Adam and Barbara get the house to themselves for two nights a month. Daddy said that it was really important for adults to have alone time so they could ‘rekindle the romance’ or whatever. Do stuff that they liked together, eat nice food, watch PG-13 rated television. Lydia wasn’t allowed to watch anything PG-13 until she was 13, which sucked because her life was kinda rated R. 

When they still lived in California with Mommy, once every few weeks Mommy and Daddy would let her stay with Grandpa while they went on a nice date and drank wine and stuff. When Lydia asked Mommy about it, she had went into a lot of details about the ‘intricacies of romance’ and how to ‘romance your husband’. 

“The important thing,” Mommy had said, because Lydia had gone back and re-memorized absolutely everything about Mommy she could, “is that you don’t take each other for granted. If you can still prioritize your husband over everything but your baby even after ten years, then you know you have a good relationship. Make an effort to make them feel special, good, and wanted. Just because you’ve made the commitment doesn’t mean that you can slack off!”

Actually, in retrospect, maybe Mommy and Delia were kind of similar. The thought was strange to Lydia. 

Still, it gave her an idea. Actually, a very good idea. A plan began to hatch in Lydia’s brain. It was a good brain, so of course it was a good plan. 

“Maybe we can have custody weekend here instead,” Aunt Barbara hinted, grinning desperately. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Uh oh. If they had the weekend here then her entire idea would be ruined before it could even begin. “We don’t have to do that!” Lydia said heatedly. “This is  _ my  _ responsibility! I’m not going to make the rest of you have to deal with this!”

Needless to say, all four of her parents hated dealing with Beej. She, uh, didn’t blame them. If he hit on her every five sentences she wouldn’t want to hang out with him either. 

“Lydia,” Daddy said, anxiously flipping through his magazine, “this isn’t a punishment -”

“No, it’s just my responsibility,” Lydia said. “I’m the one who thought this was a good idea, I’m the one who signed the contract, and now this is something I have to deal with until I turn 18. I don’t  _ mind _ .”

Everyone looked strongly as if they either disagreed with her or thought she was lying, or in Aunt Barbara’s case wished she was lying, but before anybody could say anything about it the fireplace roared to life. 

The flames roared up and licked the inside of the chimney, glowing a bright emerald green. A ghostly skull flickered within its depths, making Lydia grin and Delia make a grossed-out sound. The Maitlands stepped a safe distance away from the fireplace, crossing their arms, and Lydia watched eagerly as a black shoe stepped out of the fireplace, then a hand, then an entire body crawled out and spilled soot all over the carpet. 

“Ta-dah!” Beetlejuice said, brushing soot off his suit jacket and doing quick jazz hands as all of Lydia’s parents either glared at him (Maitlands) or avoided eye contact (Deetzes). Lydia waved eagerly. “No, no don’t rush to clap. No need to be impressed by me. I’m a humble ghoul.”

“Five out of ten,” Lydia said promptly. “Good touch with the skull, but you forgot the moaning.”

Beej rolled his eyes. Not literally. Two out of ten for a lost opportunity, Beej. “Whatever, let’s get this over with. Channel 3 has a marathon of  _ The Twilight Zone: Real Housewives of Centurion 5  _ on and I’m missing it. Grab your stuff, let’s go.”

So he was still mad. Lydia’s stomach sunk to her Doc Martens, although she wasn’t surprised. Beej still refused to talk to his next-door neighbors because they accidentally stole his mail. In 1490. 

“Beetlejuice, Adam and I have been talking,” Aunt Barbara said, and Beej looked abruptly uncomfortable. He was scared of Aunt Barbara, which was fair. “We thought that it might be a good idea for the two of us to come with you and Lydia to the Netherworld for at least a few hours today.”

“Was I going to be consulted on this?” Lydia asked, unimpressed. 

Uncle Adam just laughed awkwardly, scratching the back of his neck. “We want to stretch our legs? We’ve been stuck in the house for a while. I’ve been craving some good old fashioned Netherworld milkshakes.”

Horrifically, Beej looked almost interested. “Does that mean that you two finally -”

“ _ No _ ,” Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara said empathetically and simultaneously. 

“Aw, whatever. Prudes.” Beej reached into his pocket and withdrew a keyring, whirling it on his fingers before pressing a button on the fob. The far-off sound of a car being unlocked beeped from the keyring. “C’mon, let’s go, we’re wasting moonlight. See ya, Deetzes. C’mon, Lyds, Prudes.”

“Bye, Daddy,” Lydia said quickly, hugging Daddy tight around the middle and giving Delia a quick hug for good measure. “Bye, Delia! See you Sunday!”

“Please don’t get into any trouble,” Daddy said, pained. 

Lydia laughed, and Beej snorted, and the Maitlands just looked exasperated. 

“You won’t hear about any trouble,” Lydia said loyally, and when Beej turned on his heel and walked back into the fire she waved and rushed in after him. Aunt Barbara grabbed her hand, afraid as usual that she would get lost in the space between worlds, and Lydia tugged her along into the fire as Uncle Adam stumbled in after them. 

  
  
  


There were many levels to Hell. 

There was the first circle, Limbo. The second circle, Lust, where Beej took vacations that she wasn’t allowed on. The third circle, Gluttony. She forgot all the others, but there was also Fraud and Traitors in there somewhere. 

Beetlejuice lived on level 3.5, otherwise known as The Residential District. He said that the commute wasn’t too bad to the other levels, and that was the important thing even if the rent was way too high. It was also the  _ only  _ level suitable for little girls, so don’t even try getting into one of the others, unless you really want to, we could probably make something happen? Want to meet Judas? 

Then there was all the places you could go to  _ from  _ there. The most obvious was Saturn, which was kind of like the middle hallway of Poe where you usually ended up there if you got lost, but a great custody weekend could be had if you wandered into Grand Central Satan and bought two overflow tickets, bound on a train to wherever. That was how Lydia had met Sherlock Holmes. And went to the beach!

Lydia stepped out, still holding firmly onto Aunt Barbara’s hand, onto the cracked pavement of the Netherworld. In any other dimension the sight of them popping out from nowhere would have raised a few eyebrows, but in the Netherworld barely anybody even noticed. 

The sky was a pleasant purple, with fluffy blue clouds floating along in front of the green sun. It wasn’t as sleepy and suburban as Lydia’s boring Connecticut suburb, but it wasn’t a super industrialized city like her hometown of San Diego. Instead of it was a cool mix of a small town and your worst nightmare, which was probably also a small town. Visually, it kind of reminded her of those 1950s perfect little towns she saw in the old sitcoms, but with more murder and the parents slept in the same bed. It had what all small towns had: a big park in the center and a Main Street with kitschy stores lining it, derelict warehouses, and lots of haunted houses. In the city center, where Beej lived, there was even a lot of nice apartment buildings that looked like they wanted to eat you. It had a library, which held The Forbidden Knowledge, and a public school, that Lydia kept on campaigning to be transferred to. There was even a City Hall, where they had signed the custody agreement, and antique stores that were here one day and gone the next. Old Man Jenkins had his mad scientist laboratory, the Prince of the Netherworld who had a huge crush on her lived in a mansion on the outskirts, and the Mayor could usually be seen working hard late at night in City Hall. It was a very normal town, except for all the bits where it wasn’t. 

They had touched down in front of the 59 Diner, and Lydia cheered up immediately upon seeing it. It was one of her favorite restaurants in the whole Netherworld, mostly because it wasn’t a Golden Corral like almost all the others. Beej had told/lectured her how every building in the Netherworld was the spirit of restaurants, houses, and centers that had been Very Bad In Life, Or Maybe Just Pretty Unlucky, so when they were knocked down they popped up in the Netherworld. It made the architecture a little eclectic sometimes: lots of 1950s segregated buildings, for obvious reasons, but also a lot of Wild West Saloons and Discotheques. Delia would have said that it had “no sense for the aesthetic”, but Lydia didn’t agree. The Netherworld had a  _ great  _ aesthetic. 

“Is this place a ‘50s Diner, or a nostalgic recreation of the early 00s ideal of what ‘50s diners looked like?” Uncle Adam asked contemplatively. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“The waitresses are on roller skates,” Beej said flatly, pushing open the double doors of the diner and letting the doors hit Uncle Adam on the forehead. “And they keep on mistaking me for Jack Black and asking me to play the crowd with my Archie and the Archies cover band. Ironic early 00s recreation definitely.”

“You do look a lot like him,” Aunt Barbara said contemplatively, smiling at Uncle Adam as he held the door open for her and Lydia. Acts of chivalry were unheard of and anathema in the Netherworld, unless they were  _ super  _ condescending, and Lydia anxiously glanced around to make sure nobody had seen it. Those two just didn’t fit in here. 

“He lifted my style, I didn’t lift his,” Beej snapped. “I’m a fu-dge machine, he has a gaming Youtube channel with his small child. Who really won here.”

Lydia perked up. “I’ll start a Youtube channel with you, Beej.”

To her relief, he thought carefully about it. That was the cool thing about him: he always thought about her ideas. He wasn’t an adult who always thought that he knew best. “Would it be a prank channel where we pretend to give money to homeless people?” He asked finally. 

“I wouldn’t do that!” Lydia cried, appalled. 

“Then what’s the fudging point?”

“It could be a prank channel where we put laxatives in the coffee of oil and gas employees,” Lydia suggested eagerly. “Or roaches!”

For a minute Beej seemed to perk up, clearly warming up to the idea. That was how it usually went: Lydia was the ideas girl, Beej made stuff happen. They were a great team. But then he seemed to remember that he was mad at her, so he just rolled his eyes (figuratively) and stomped ahead to slide into a booth. 

It felt like a fifty pound weight had landed on Lydia’s chest. She sagged, clutching Aunt Barbara’s hand tighter, but even through her disappointment she didn’t miss the significant look Aunt Barbara and Uncle Adam exchanged. 

It was sunset on a Friday, and the diner was hopping. As Lydia passed by the booths filled with all sorts of ghosts, demons, ghouls, skeletons, parasites, Man Sized Bugs, Bug Sized Men, critters, crawlies, Tax Attorneys, and Basically Ne’er Do Wells Just Trying To Eke Out a Living In This Economy, they all took notice of her. She was a well-known and popular sight in the community, and as she passed by customers enjoying a hearty meal of mealworms they usually raised an appendage in greeting or flagged her down to ask her how she was, or smiled at her. 

“Lydia!” A ghost boomed, unearthly blue orbs flicking in the fluorescent lighting. “Custody weekend again?”

Lydia smiled at him, waving with her free hand. “You know it, Old Man Sticks. How’s the grubs?”

“Pupating!” He laughed jovially, winking at her and the Maitlands. “Tell Ol’ BJ he owes me five bucks, will ya?”

“You’re getting your money back over my haunted grave, Sticks!” Beej called out from a few booths over, giving him his finger. Literally, this time - he ripped it off and threw it at him. 

The next booth ever, a group of teenage werewolves noticed Lydia walk in, and immediately three of them started heckling and pushing at a smaller werewolf in the middle of the group. The smaller werewolf - who Lydia recognized as Luke, a friend she had made when she had infiltrated his school in a desperate attempt to enroll herself - covered his eyes with an oversized paw, whimpering slightly.

“Hi, Lyds!” His friend, who Lydia remembered was named Spot, barked. He elbowed Luke, who just looked even more embarrassed. “You’re back! Are you going to check out the haunted convenience store with us tonight?”

“Don’t invite her,” Luke hissed. “Spot! Stop!”

All the other werewolves started beating the table and howling, making Lydia laugh and Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara exchange glances again. 

“Wish I could, boys,” Lydia said easily. “But I got my own plans for the night. Some other time, yeah?”

Kevin awoo’d tragically. “Don’t tell me you’re hanging out with your old man again. We haven’t gotten all of the crocs out of the sewer from last time!”

“Entertaining my aunt and uncle,” Lydia said, waving them off as all their tails thumped. Friendly guys. “I’ll catch up with you later?”

Kevin straightened. “Catch? Did you say catch?”

“Catch! Catch! Catch!” the other werewolves chanted, thumping the table. “Catch! Catch! Catch!”

After that Aunt Barbara quickly lead her away, scooting into the booth and sandwiching her between herself and Uncle Adam. Beej was already lying down on the bright sparkly red vinyl booth, staring desolately at the Elvis records decorating the walls and the ‘COCA COLA: NEVER AGAIN’ tin retro advertisements hanging up. 

“Does everyone in this diner know you, Lydia?” Uncle Adam asked, raising an eyebrow as a skeleton across the room raised a jug of root beer in a toast to Lydia. Lydia smiled and waved, and they all watched in fascination as the skeleton chugged the root beer and it dumped straight through him onto the vinyl. “You seem...popular.”

“I guess,” Lydia said off-handedly. “You guys should drop by here more often. It’s pretty tight. I usually clean out on the neighborhood’s Saturday Night Poker.”

“I’m not sure if this is the kind of place where we really fit in,” Aunt Barbara said, anxiously eyeing a disembodied floating eye skimming the floor to ask the waitress where the bathroom was. “The people here seem a bit...different.”

“That’s what I like about it!” Lydia said. “Besides, aren’t you two different too?”

“Hah!” Beej said, folding his arms on his chest like a corpse in a coffin. “Different! Don’t make me laugh. I’ll laugh anyway. Hah!”

“Something you want to say, Beetlejuice?” Uncle Adam asked patiently. You kind of had to be, when dealing with Beej. 

“It’s the people in Kill Yourself, Connecticut that are different,” Beej said. “I did your town a favor when I fudged it up. Thousands of people flushing decades of their lives down the drain pretending they’re a stepford picture perfect family. That’s different. It’s downright unnatural.”

Tellingly, the Maitlands didn’t disagree. Instead, Aunt Barbara just said, “It’s damaging, being desperate to be normal. But I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to like normal things.”

“You’re all lying to yourselves,” Beej said flatly, almost philosophically. “Homeowners Associations. Etsy stores. Multilevel Marketing schemes. Show choir. All bullshiz.”

“Still can’t curse, huh?” Uncle Adam asked gleefully. 

“We’re on Fox, what the fudge do you think?” Beej sighed, as if he has the weight on his world on his shoulders. “Capitalism, Nationalism, the Patriarchy, Cisheterohegemony, and the Military-Industrial complex all working together in a swirl of authoritarianism to produce picture perfect people that never have an original thought in their heads. Now it’s brainwashing my beautiful, lovely foster daughter into just being another square to hammer into a square hole. Another one bootlicks the dust.”

Uh-oh. So this  _ was  _ about her. Lydia squirmed uncomfortably in her seat as Aunt Barbara sighed, folding her hands on the table. She opened her mouth, but whatever she was about to say was cut short by the waitress rollerskating up to their table. She was holding a pitcher of banana-infused water and a bored expression. 

She looked directly at the Maitlands. “I’ll serve you, but only if you make sure BJ doesn’t skimp out on his bill.”

“We have it covered,” Uncle Adam said, pained. 

“Sweet.” She popped her gum, before winking lightly at Lydia. “What’s up, sugarpie.”

“Hi Ms. Adam,” Lydia said politely. “Can I have a chocolate slime milkshake, please?”

“You got it, honey. And the ghosts?”

Uncle Adam glanced down at the menu he hadn’t even had the opportunity to look at, looking somewhat overwhelmed. They had been there a few times, but not very frequently and usually without her. “Uh - what milkshake flavors do you have today?”

Ms. Adam sighed, and recited extremely rapidly in a very bored voice, “We got plum and rum and bubble gum. We got prune, balloon, and macaroons. We got grape, ape, and scotch tape. Sarsaparilla, mansarilla, and caterpillar. And, of course, just plain old gorilla.”

“Got any vanilla?” Aunt Barbara asked hopefully. 

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, so  _ she  _ gets to curse!” Beej shouted. 

“What color balloon,” Uncle Adam asked. 

“Do you remember your twelfth birthday party when your mother helped you blow up a dozen balloons because you invited your entire class to a pool party at your house, but nobody came? That flavor.”

“Grape, please,” Uncle Adam said, pale. 

“Oh, Macaroon milkshake sounds lovely,” Aunt Barbara said eagerly. “Thank you so much!”

“Gimmie a beer,” Beej said. 

“Fuck you,” the waitress said, and skated away. 

“Why does everybody like you so much more than me?” Beej asked flatly, finally sitting up and glaring at her. “Is it the hair? Is it the uncanny resemblance to Jack Black?”

“I think it’s the fact that you never pay your bill and you tip in fingernails,” Lydia said.

“Everyone around town is starting to call me ‘Lydia’s Old Man’!” Beej cried, throwing up his hands. “When your entire power revolves around people saying your name, and the nickname isn’t even ‘Lydia’s Cool DILF’ or something, that fudging sucks!”

“What does DILF mean?” Uncle Adam asked. 

“Legally, I cannot tell you.”

“I think you’re a DILF, Adam,” Aunt Barbara said sweetly, kissing him on the cheek over Lydia’s head. Everyone around them, who were shamelessly listening in on the conversation, aww’d. 

“The Prince of the Netherworld has a crush on me,” Lydia confessed. “He keeps on proposing whenever I see him? But Beej says that I’m not allowed to marry until I’m at least fourteen.”

“You mean eighteen,” Aunt Barbara corrected. 

“No, I’m certain he said fourteen.”

“I am  _ not  _ responsible for her dowry,” Beej said. “That one is on you guys.”

“Okay, that is it,” Aunt Barbara snapped, and she slammed her hands on the table. Beej, who had experienced her matronly wrath before, slunk back, and Lydia and Uncle Adam started. “The  _ only _ reason Adam and I are even here is because Lydia has been doing nothing but moping around the house for days! If you two are fighting, we are here to fix it, deal with conflict, and move on. And you are supposed to be the adult here, Beetlejuice! Don’t tell me you’ve been sulking everywhere because a middle schooler hurt your feelings?”

Beej sputtered, and Lydia herself was slightly insulted. She wasn’t sure Beej was an adult by any measure of the word. “What makes you think I’ve been sulking? Me? I don’t sulk! What? No! It’s none of my business if Lyd’s been moody. She’s a teen, they do that!”

“She’s  _ eleven _ ,” Aunt Barbara stressed. “And we  _ know  _ you. A week after we met you, you called us more boring than Brigadoone because we didn’t think you were God’s Gift to Ghosts!”

“You have a very fragile ego,” Uncle Adam added.

“Worst break-up of my afterlife,” Beej muttered. 

“ _ We were never together!” _

“I was listening to Adele for weeks.”

“Oh, you should have seen me when Barbara broke up with me for two weeks when we were sixteen,” Uncle Adam said eagerly. “It was Taylor Swift nonstop, 24/7!”

“I have an idea,” Lydia said suddenly, and everyone shut up, because they knew what that meant. Lydia unzipped her backpack and pulled out her Adventure Time notebook and a sparkly black gel pen with a pom pom at the end. She slid the notebook onto the sticky table and flipped it open to the page where he had written down all of her plans on it. Written in very big letters on the top was ‘HOW TO BE FRIENDS WITH BJ AGAIN’. “My Mommy said that if you want to keep a relationship you have to put work into it.”

The Maitlands paled even more and glared at Beej, who abruptly looked very panicked. “Different universe! Different universe! I didn’t do nothin’!”

“I don’t want to say sorry to Beej,” Lydia said, and this was something that she knew she deeply needed to say. “Because I’m not, and I don’t think I was wrong. But I do understand how he feels. I’ve been taking our relationship for granted, and I decided I need to prove that Beej is still my number one best friend. So I made up a great big list of all of our favorite things, so we can do them all this weekend! Like Daddy and Delia’s date nights where they go to wine tastings, or Uncle Adam and Aunt Barbara’s date nights where they watch Friends together, except different because I can’t drink and Friends is bad. But you are one of the most important people in two worlds to me, Beej, and I’m sorry if you don’t feel like it. I want to prove it so you don’t feel in-se-cure anymore.” She beamed at him. “What do you say!”

It was only once she finished the little speech that she had rehearsed (and written on the next page of the notebook) that she realized that the diner was quiet. 

Everyone around them, or at least the ones who weren’t bothering to hide the fact that they were eavesdropping, looked either emotional at her stirring speech or were glaring daggers at Beej. The werewolves’ ears were twitching, and Luke had a disturbingly starry look in his eyes. Old Man Sticks was chuckling into his plate of wood mice, and the various and assorted ghouls and skeletons were either whispering to themselves or nodding approvingly. 

“Way to make the baby do all the emotional labor in your relationship, BJ!” One of the skeletons cried. 

“She’s so cute,” an oversized rodent sighed, before looking at their spouse. “When are we having one, dear?”

“Boo, BJ, you’re a bad parent!” another skeleton heckled.

Its friend clacked its jaw in a jittering laugh. “Get a job, BJ!” 

“Will you all shove off!” Beej yelled, snapping his fingers, and a crack of Aura echoed over the diner. Everyone hurriedly went back to their food, and Lydia abruptly remembered that despite how pathetic he came off the vast majority of the time Beej was pretty powerful. Being a Demon wasn’t a vanity position. 

He sighed, running his filthy fingers through his filthy hair, and they all sat in awkward silence for a minute as Lydia clutched the notebook tightly and the Maitlands glared at Beej. Finally, he sighed and said, “I’m...sorry, I guess, or whatever.”

They sat in silence some more. 

“That’s it?” Aunt Barbara asked dangerously. 

“And I really shouldn’t have made the five year old do all the emotional labor in this relationship when I’m nominally the adult, which means that I shouldn’t put my ego over her emotional and physical wellbeing,” Beej said quickly. “And I will take you to the fourth circle of hell...once.”

“Yay!” Lydia cheered. “Thank you, Beetlejuice! I’m glad we’re friends again!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

But she thought that he looked secretly pretty pleased. 

After that the waitress brought their milkshakes, and Lydia’s was  _ on the house  _ because apparently she was cute or something, and she sucked happily on the sludge as she and Beej talked about all the fun stuff they were going to do that weekend. She had lots of plans, and he added in some pretty good ideas himself. The Maitlands tried to veto some of them, but after a while they just seemed amused, and even Uncle Adam had a good idea or two for a really nice haunting. 

Even the Maitlands and Beej seemed to get along. It occurred to Lydia that, even if they weren’t exactly friends, they had one important thing in common. That thing kept them together, even if they weren’t used to it, but maybe it was for the best. The Maitlands could stand to loosen up a little, and Beej needed somebody scary like Aunt Barbara in his life to keep him responsible. She even got the sense that maybe, if Beej would just let up with the flirting, that they might be into having a nice date night sometime. Maybe. In the future. Far future. 

Lydia sucked at her milkshake and spat out all of the rocks she found in it, kicking her heels against the vinyl, and felt very happy. It was a warm feeling in her chest, soft and fluttery, but strong as steel too. Knowing that she was cared about, even by people who didn’t tend to care about much, even by people who weren’t good at showing it, was better than a million pineapple and snake pizzas. 

  
  


After they waved the Maitlands home, after they went back to Beej’s small apartment that he always made a point of cleaning before she came over, after a late night laughing over Netherland’s reality TV and her favorite cartoon that seemed to portray something weirdly close to her life, Beej snapped his fingers and pulled the couch out into a bed. Lydia flopped sheets over it and snuggled in, dressed in her fuzzy Netherworld pyjamas with eyes on them that really cried, and clapped all of the lights off so that the room was dim except for the large moon beaming moonshine through the window with its unholy smile. 

“Welp, great, have fun with that sleeping thing. I’m going to go soundproof my bedroom now. If you hear any noises...it’s the television.” 

“But Beej,” Lydia said, making her eyes very big. “You said you’d do  _ Alice in Wonderland _ !”

“I said no such thing,” he said flatly. “You can’t con a conman, kid.”

She made her eyes very, very big. 

“Jesus, okay, fine, stop looking at me like that, god.”

She eagerly pulled her favorite book out of her bag, holding it in front of her like a trophy or an offering. It had been a gift from Mommy, for her eighth birthday. It was a beautiful, embossed and gilded copy with John Tenniel’s original illustrations. The pages were gold and there was a red ribbon. It was her very favorite book, and it was very special to her. Usually it wasn’t a good idea to take anything  _ too  _ important to the Netherworld, because sometimes she accidentally got lit on fire and then Daddy had to buy her a new backpack, but she made an exception this one time. 

“Okay, whatever.” He sat down on the bed next to her, and Lydia scooted over to make room. “Aren’t you too old for this?”

“I read the Illiad last week,” Lydia said proudly. “But I can’t make the pictures move like you can!”

“Watch a movie.”

“ _ Beej - _ ”

“Fine, fine! Whatever!” He flipped open the book, and Lydia snuggled in. Even if he whined about it, he’d do a great job. Beej was a showman. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank -”

“No, go to my favorite part,” Lydia said impatiently. “And do that thing with your teeth.”

“The Prince of the Netherworld does not know what he’s signing up for,” Beej grumbled, but he flipped through the book anyway. He cleared his throat, and adopted an even gravelier voice. Sure, Lydia could read at a college level. But could she make the cat on the page wink and flick its tail? Could she see Alice on the page shift and transform into a girl who looked very much like Lydia, with a spiderweb dress? “ ‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat. ‘we’re all mad here’.”

And when the cat disappeared, leaving only its bright grin behind, so Beetlejuice did too, fading away into nothing as both Alice and Lydia revelled in finally finding a place where, even if they didn’t belong, at least nobody else did either. 

But soon, after they fell into the rhythm of the story, Lydia’s eyelids began to grow heavy, and she began yawning more than usual. Beej noticed, and he put the book down, and stood up from the bed. 

But Lydia’s hand shot out, almost of its own volition, and clasped onto his wrist. 

“Beetlejuice?” Lydia asked, yawning loudly. “Where is the Netherworld?”

Beej raised an eyebrow at her, and it crawled up and away as if it was a centipede. He looked around, as if he was checking to see if anybody was listening in, and leaned in like he was sharing a secret. “Humans say that in the moment of death, when the brain is getting ready to Kick The Big Bucket, it floods with endorphins,” he said conspiratorially. “The brain, when the heart is shutting down and the organs are failing, releases all the floodgates of ion channels and serotonin and dopamine and GABA and glutamate. It’s a real party. In the gap between the neurotransmitters, in the space between atoms, that’s where the Afterworld lives. Not in time, but in space. Then, with a snap,” and Beej snapped his fingers, just for emphasis, “the brain knows no more. And you’re dead. But alive, always, in that final Biblical flood of hormones.”

Oh. She didn’t know what most of that meant. Lydia yawned again, only half-aware of the conversation they were having. “Where’s Heaven, then? Is it there too?”

Beej just laughed. “Want to hear a secret, kid? Something nobody else alive knows?” Lydia nodded, obviously. His yellow teeth flashed, and his yellow slit eyes glittered, and in that moment he looked very much like something both alive and dead. “You know that when you die, you go to the Netherworld. Or Hell. Whatever. God’s a scam.” Lydia nodded again. They had the ‘Christianity is a Pyramid Scheme’ talk Day 2 of their friendship. “You have to walk through Hell to get to Heaven. That’s where you’ll find it. Some people get through. A lot of ‘em don’t. But the secret, Lydia, is that everybody gets to Heaven eventually. Hell...the Afterlife, the Netherworld...is just an inbetween.”

“And that’s where my Mommy is,” Lydia said, satisfied. “Is that where I’m going when I die?”

Beej laughed again, as if what she said was very funny. “Oh, honey. When you die, you and I are going to have a blast.”

That sounded good. Lydia liked fun. And she liked having a friend like Beej. 

She fell asleep, like sliding down a long dark tunnel into where she was afraid to go, in the space between neurons and the gap between molecules. 

Lydia dreamed of hell, and of heaven, and of her friend Beetlejuice, and of everything in between. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Jack (for lending me your favorite, now deceased, diner) and Nymm_at_night (for lending me you). I'm reachable at theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com in case you want to ask me why I do this. I have no answer.


End file.
